NO CLEAN SINGING

MISERATION: “ON WINGS OF BRIMSTONE”

Jun 072012

We’ve already posted twice about the forthcoming album by Sweden’s Miseration, so this makes three. Late yesterday, the band released a second track from the album for YouTube streaming. This one’s called “On Wings of Brimstone”

The album is Tragedy Has Spoken and it will be released by Lifeforce Records on July 2 in Europe and a day later in North America. As previously noted, the artwork is by the ubiquitous and dependably awesome Pär Olofsson. I thoroughly enjoyed this band’s ass-blasting last album, The Mirroring Shadow (2009), and had high hopes for the new one. I’ve only found time for one spin through it so far, and it’s certainly not a clone of The Mirroring Shadow, but it’s quite cool.

Among other things, it incorporates the use of 8-string guitars and folk instruments such as the Indian Esraj harp, the Persian hammered dulcimer called a Santur, sawblade, organ, mandolin, and piano, as well as Mongolian throatsinging. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much of that just from listening. Although I’m familiar with a vast array of instruments, most of them are the kind you buy online and have them shipped to a one-use only P.O. box, though possibly a Santur was included as a bonus in my last shipment. I know there was something in there that involved strings and a hammer.

Anyway, there’s a lot going on in “On Wings of Brimstone”. There is definitely some up-tempo ass-blasting brutality, a la The Mirroring Shadow, but the song also includes dark stomping chords with an old-school Swedeath tone, a white-hot guitar solo, and a dramatic melody. And Christian Älvestam provides an impressive array of vocals style, from flesh-flaying howls to abyss-deep growls to soaring cleans. There might be an Esraj in the mix, too, though since I’ve never heard an Esraj it’s difficult to be sure. Very nice song — listen after the jump. Continue reading »

I’M NOT GOING TO CALL THIS “THINGS I SAW AND HEARD YESTERDAY” BECAUSE I’VE OVERUSED THAT LINE SO I’LL COME UP WITH SOMETHING ELSE

Jun 072012

Really, I swear, this isn’t going to become a regular feature, despite the fact that this is the fourth time I’ve done one of these posts in the last week. And the proof is that I’m not using the same name for this post as I did for the last ones. I’m calling it something different. You can see that.

Anyway, here are some things I saw and heard yesterday and last night, and at the end of the post I’ll have an update on our experiment in paying to promote our Facebook posts. Here’s a disgusting hint: It works.

I saw an announcement by Century Media that Swedish death metal icons Grave (in their leather finery up above) will release their 10th studio album, Endless Procession Of Souls, on August 27th in Europe and on August 28th in North America. I’m already beginning to get the stench of rotting corpsemeat up inside my nose. I’ll probably stop bathing soon, just to get myself fully attuned to the reek by August. We previously reported that Grave will be touring NorthAm with Dark Funeral (and some band named Morbid Angel) this September and October.

And speaking of grisly old-school Swedish death metal, I received through the ether an electronic copy of a new EP from Mexico’s Zombiefication called Reaper’s Consecration. I’ve only listened to two of the five tracks so far, but it is a fucking brain assassin, and the EP includes this sweet cover art designd by the band’s vocalist Mr. Hitch: Continue reading »

CHEMICAL TOMB: S/T

Album Reviews, Free Shit, Phro's Posts 6 Responses »

Jun 062012

(Phro reviews the 2012 free EP by “2 Polish and two English scumbags stuck in the shit hole known as Plymouth”, a/k/a Chemical Tomb.)

Grindcore.

Can you think of any genre label more accurate to the genre it describes? Not even “death metal” carries the visceral weight of “holy-fuck-who-just-shoved-a-chainsaw-in-my-ear” that is imparted by the two syllables of “grindcore.” And when you make like a bath salt abuser (salter? bather?) and start chopping wildly at random appendages and slice off the “core,” you just get “grind”: simple and glorious like unrepentant morning wood, standing ready to fuck everything with violent dissonance.

Which brings us to my early morning discovery today: Chemical Tomb.

They seem to have a thing for pot, based on their movie samples. I forgive them because they made my ears cum and bleed at the same time. (Cleed? Blum?)

This EP, if it’s long enough to be anything more than a single, is all of 5 minutes. Perfect for a quickie before work or, if you put it on a loop, to help you get through a few rounds in a cage match. I think. I’m not actually sure how cage matches work…do they involve whiskey? They should. Everything is better with whiskey.

Anyway. The music. Well, obviously, I’m gonna just put that handy little bandcamp player after this. But maybe you’re at work and you can’t listen to music. So you need words—my words, sweaty with exertion and flush with eagerness to please—to give you an idea of what you’re missing out on. Continue reading »

SHADOWS FALL: “FIRE FROM THE SKY”

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Jun 062012

(After a bit of a hiatus, TheMadIsraeli returns to NCS with this review of the new album by Shadows Fall., which was released on May 15 by Razor and Tie.)

My articles have fucking sucked lately.

I don’t mean to write shitty articles, but when great metal albums are so few in number, and pre-canned bullshit with a side of genericore are all that surround me, I make do with what I can find. I try to write about shit I think you guys will like, and please don’t take this as me saying that I don’t believe in anything I’ve reviewed lately. I do.

But fuck, is finding good — no, great — metal a needle-in-the-haystack endeavor like anything else?

Shadows Fall decided it was time to end that shit and give me a swift kick in the balls. Fire From The Sky reminds me of exactly why I fell in love with metalcore when it first arose from the ashes of the nu-metal bullshit of the 90’s and kicked unsuspecting angsty teens with daddy issues in the fucking teeth. This odd melding of thrash, melodic death, and hardcore got my blood pumping so hard I pissed razors and shot acid from my eyes at any butt-rock or alt-metal fan who wanted to tell me any differently. Even while incorporating commercial elements sch as a few scant soft moments, clean vocals, and catchy choruses, Shadows Fall managed to bust jaws and crack skulls with the best. I sincerely think if Of One Blood or The Art Of Balance didn’t send you into head-banging convulsions, you were probably one of these embittered retro assholes who felt that metal died in the early 90’s and that bands like fucking Pantera were the last bastion of good music (protip: they weren’t).

Fire From The Sky has everything that established this band’s foothold in the realm of badassery, and more. Shadows Fall not only have the gift of the riff, the attitude, and the passion for playing what they play, but they’ve managed to keep it up over the course of seven full-lengths now. Retribution kicked me in the fucking ass, shoved a bomb up it, and detonated it, turning me into instagib salad sludge for the wolves to feed on. Fire From The Sky is more like being put through Spetznaz training where they teach you how to take a full-force punch to the stomach. How? By punching you in the fucking stomach. Over and over again, at the risk of internal bleeding. Continue reading »

DID FACEBOOK JUST MAKE A HARD LIFE HARDER FOR UNDERGROUND BANDS?

Metal News 81 Responses »

Jun 062012

Maybe this is old news to people better informed than I am, but I just discovered some very disturbing developments at Facebook. What I found is ironic. Last weekend, I used screen shots of Facebook posts by metal bands as a snapshot of the kinds of difficulties that underground bands face in attempting to continue creating music and performing. Now, it turns out that Facebook is restricting the ability of metal bands — and labels and blogs like ours — to market themselves and stay in touch with their fans through Facebook.

How long has this been going on? I haven’t yet found the answer to that question. But one thing is quite clear: When a band or a label or a blog like ours adds a post on Facebook, most of our fans who have “liked” us do not receive those posts. Here’s what I know:

NCS has a Facebook page. I add a Facebook post every time we add a post on this site, as one way of telling people we’ve done something new and ridiculous on this site (or new and awesome, in the case of posts created by the other writers). At this writing, we have 1,476 Facebook “likes” — a number that’s pitifully inadequate considering the amazing quality of our content, but still better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

As the “Admin” of our Facebook page, I started noticing recently a set of statistics at the bottom of each one of our FB posts showing the number of “people reached” by each of those posts, and the percentage of all the people who “like” our page who saw the post. Since then, I’ve been looking at those stats, and the percentage has never been as high as 50%, and it’s usually less than a third of all the people who have “liked” us.

I assumed that when I added a post, it would show up in the news stream for every person on FB who had “liked” our page. When I saw those “people reached” statistics, I assumed that FB had implemented some kind of algorithm to calculate how many of those people had logged in to FB and perused their news stream. WRONG. Continue reading »

YOU WILL HATE ME FOR THIS

IQ Subtraction, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 37 Responses »

Jun 052012

Here is what will happen:

You will watch this video. You will be tempted to stop it almost immediately, but you’ll be in “what the fuck am I seeing?” mode just long enough for the song to change gears and then you’ll get sucked in, but then you’ll still want to vomit and have to swallow a little spew because everything about it is offensive, from the band’s name to the lyrics to the music, but you’ll keep watching, and then you’ll play it again and then you’ll go watch the video of the song that’s got the lyrics on the screen, and then you’ll walk around the rest of the day humming to yourself, “Is anyone up?” or maybe “your pussy, your boobies, on the world wide web”, and you’ll hate yourself for doing that and then you’ll hate me for making you hate yourself, and you’ll wonder what you did to deserve having this video inflicted on you, and then you’ll remember that thing you paid to watch on your computer the other night when you thought no one would know and then you’ll realize that I know everything you do and you’ll be afraid I’ll use what I know to extort sexual favors and you’ll hate me more and you’ll want to leave some really insulting comments which I will enjoy reading, and it will dawn on you that you’ve fallen into a sadomasochistic relationship with NCS from which you can’t escape, and then you’ll hate me some more.

Okay, okay, I suppose there’s an infinitesimally small chance my prediction is wrong. It could be that you’ll just shut this thing off within 10 seconds and go straight to the hating me part. Either way, you’ll hate me. But I’ll make it up to you — you’ll see. This is how I’ll make it up to you: Continue reading »

THE GHOST INSIDE: “ENGINE 45”

Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Jun 052012

I don’t listen to much hardcore or metalcore these days, which I suppose is obvious because we write about it so infrequently at NCS. But I used to be pretty heavy into that music years ago, and I still follow a handful of bands, The Ghost Inside from L.A. being one of them.

The band have a new album called Get What You Give that’s due for release by Epitaph Records on June 19. This morning, Absolute Punk premiered The Ghost Inside’s official video for a single from the album (which is available on iTunes and Amazon) called “Engine 45”. I fell into the song pretty fast, with a smile on my face, because these guys punch pretty fuckin’ hard . . . and then I got a surprise that I didn’t immediately love: clean vocals.

They definitely weren’t necessary, and The Ghost Inside haven’t needed them in the past. As the first part of the song demonstrates, the emotionally affecting chorus melody could have been carried solely by the lead guitar, without Jonathan Vigil departing from his hardcore vocal style. But I do understand why this was done. The song makes a transition (quite seamlessly) from the physical attack with which it opens to a sweeping melodic finish, with the clean vocals being added to the guitars to underscore the change (a change that’s further underscored in the imagery that’s interleaved with shots of the band performing).

Given the usual profile of this site, I don’t expect many of you are going to fall for this song in the same way I did, but we’ll see. Check out the video after the jump and let me know what you think. I’ve also added a stream of another song from the new album called “Slipping Away”, which came out last week. Continue reading »

BYZANTINE UPDATE: THE “PATHOGEN” PLAYTHROUGH

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Jun 052012

I’m writing this post in the Seattle ferry terminal at 11:45 p.m. on a Monday night, waiting for the 12:15 a.m. sailing that will take me home. But being still awake in a place I’d rather not be, instead of fast asleep in my own bed, turns out to have its compensations. I turned on my laptop, because that seemed like a better idea than staring at the other bleary-eyed derelicts waiting for the same ferry boat, and what did I spy but a just-released play-through video of a new Byzantine song by Chris (“O.J.”) Ojeda.

We’ve been spreading the gospel of the reborn Byzantine since we first found out about their reunion in January. More than four years have passed since their last album, Oblivion Beckons, and it seemed for a long time than Oblivion Beckons was the band’s swan song. But they are back, with the original line-up in place, anchored by Chris Ojeda and Byzantine’s other masterful guitarist Tony Rohrbaugh.

Byzantine was way ahead of their time, and the passage of time has only proved just how far ahead of things they were, because their albums still sound fresh and immediate. I can still vividly remember my wide-eyed reaction at hearing their full-length debut, The Fundamental Component, and then watching with fascination as they progressed through …And They Shall Take Up Serpents and Oblivion Beckons. They’ve already staked their place in the evolution of metal, but they clearly haven’t lost the drive, the song-writing creativity, and the technical skill that produced those albums.

Last night, Chris Ojeda finished tracking the rhythm guitars for the band’s new album, at past 2 a.m., West Virginia time. And to celebrate the occasion, he ripped a play-through of a song called “Pathogen”, which he said nearly didn’t make the cut for the new album. And sitting in the un-cozy confines of the Seattle ferry terminal, I heard it soon after it went up on YouTube, and now you can, too. Continue reading »

THINGS I HEARD AND SAW THIS MORNING

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 6 Responses »

Jun 042012

I don’t really intend to make a habit of these posts, even though this is the third one like this I’ve done in a week. Or maybe it’s already a habit, like smoking hair through a gasoline bong. I don’t know.

Anyway, I heard a new song from King of Asgard today. The last time I wrote about this Swedish band was all the way back in September 2010, via a MISCELLANY post in which I sampled their last album, Fi’mbulvintr. They now have a new album set for release by Metal Blade on various dates from July 27 to July 31, depending on where you live. The album title is …To North, and above is the extremely cool oil-on-panel cover art by Mattias Frisk.

The new song, which began streaming today, is “The Nine Worlds Burn”, and it’s also extremely cool. Basically, King of Asgard are doing it again — combining deeply charred Viking metal with enchanting, clean female vocals. It’s like Naglfar, but with a surprising and effective folk accent. Check it out:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/47946772″ iframe=”true” /]

PARADISE LOST: “TRAGIC IDOL”

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Jun 042012

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the new album by Paradise Lost.)

Angry metal is easy listening music. Anger rears its ugly head all too often in modern life; we find it easily, relate to it easily. But the negative spectrum of emotions stretches far past anger, and the feelings in its more obscure realms—frustration, longing, melancholy—make music just as stimulating. Sometimes more so. Unlike anger, love, and lust (the pop music stock-and-trade), Melancholy has no object to fixate on. It floats in the air without form or shape. More than those other emotions, we need art and music to give these tough, amorphous emotions a form.

Enter Paradise Lost. Continue reading »

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